Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion coins each year, forever

Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by fnordfnordfnord on Sunday February 02, 2014 @12:03PM (#7166575)

It's not so bad in theory, at least it counters the deflationary-currencies-are-evil-and-stupid argument. The real worry is that now some entity has been entrusted with the ability to manipulate the value of the currency, and that the entity may violate that trust by later deciding to further inflate the currency.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by mtrimpe on Sunday February 02, 2014 @01:21PM (#7166849)

You would need a ~50% consensus (measured in compute power) to push through these manipulations though.

Never thought I'd find myself calling a distributed cryptocurrency surprisingly democractic...

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by sirclueless on Sunday February 02, 2014 @02:26PM (#7167119)

Does anyone have a good explanation as to why this is supposed to be hard to achieve? What incentive do miners in the distant future have against inflating a cryptocurrency?

For example, take Bitcoin after the cap has been reached and mining bitcoins only gives fees. If 50% of miners cooperate to make blocks worth real bitcoins again, they will suddenly start raking in more profit. They will be devaluing everyone's stores of bitcoins to do it, but people who hold bitcoins have no say in it, only computing power does. If we assume that miners will be the main owners of bitcoins for all eternity then they will probably never agree to this, but if there are a lot of miners with very little in reserve then why wouldn't they accept devaluing bitcoins a little bit to get more per block mined?

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by wmf on Sunday February 02, 2014 @03:15PM (#7167378)

Exchanges and other prominent users would probably also have to agree to the change. Things might get bad if there was a split between miners and everyone else because the miners could perform 51% attacks on the other fork, though.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by sixothree on Sunday February 02, 2014 @01:07PM (#7166797)

Everything about DOGE seems like some bizarre social experiment.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by rodgerd on Sunday February 02, 2014 @05:56PM (#7167976)

The Jamaican bobsled team are going to the Olympics based on donations from a cryptocurrency based on a set of jokes centered around a picture of a dog from a blog.

There is a reason William Gibson stopped doing straight sci-fi.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by sixothree on Monday February 03, 2014 @03:18PM (#7173186)

My question is who spent $30,000 to buy all those DOGEcoins?

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by boyter on Monday February 03, 2014 @06:55PM (#7174473)

Many people. I personally threw $100 in because why not? Its a small amount of cash to lose. I am willing to bet more then 300 people have spent more then $100.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by wmf on Sunday February 02, 2014 @03:16PM (#7167388)

now some entity has been entrusted with the ability to manipulate the value of the currency

Not really; inflation is built into the code and getting everyone to "upgrade" would be difficult.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by iwwr on Sunday February 02, 2014 @04:16PM (#7167623)

The inflation rate over time will actually tend to zero, since each additional 5bn coins represents a smaller proportion of the total amount. A constant quantity over time translates into a decreasing rate of inflation.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by mpyne on Sunday February 02, 2014 @06:00PM (#7167989)

That's not accounting for lost coins (either because the wallet is lost or the owner is prevented from spending them).

The idea in the github thread seems to be that the 5% inflation should approximately cancel out the unknown loss of coins that would be going on.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by iwwr on Monday February 03, 2014 @12:47AM (#7169069)

That's also insufficient over the long term since coins are lost as a proportion of the total per unit of time.

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Re:Dogecoin decides to allow annual inflation of 5 billion c... by zanny on Sunday February 02, 2014 @10:23PM (#7168623)

This is important - anything that a majority of a cryptocurrencies userbase doesn't like won't get implemented because they wouldn't upgrade the protocol, they would fork it.

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